December 2010

I’ve been working on setting up buildbot to run a simple continuous-integration process for at least some of the development work at IntelePeer. The main goal is to get fast, automated feedback when someone pushes a commit to the git repo that breaks the build or tests.

The first step is to get buildbot to be able to build from scratch. The initial setup wasn’t hard, but getting the build recipe right took some doing, mostly due to funky daemon account setup and associated permissions. I finally had a successful build on attempt #16…

Next step is to get the post-receive hooks set up in the master repo to tell buildbot when changes come in. Looks like that shouldn’t be too hard, though we do already have another post-receive hook, so I’ll be using something like this to allow multiple hooks.

Then the real issue: getting a useful, reliable test suite. So far that’s not a big part of the developer philosophy at the company, but I’ve been making some steps to work that in. There is at least a minimal suite for the parts I’ve written so far, and testing that is better than nothing. There’s still a long way to go, and it’s a lot harder to build a test suite after development is done versus in phase with the main code development.